Chief of BET Plans to Broaden Programming Appeal

WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 - As corporate coming-outs go, it has been a long one. For nearly a decade Debra L. Lee, as chief operating officer of Black Entertainment Television, ran the lucrative and controversial cable network while Robert L. Johnson, its charismatic and equally controversial founder, remained its public face and sole voice.

Though Ms. Lee was formally named president and chief executive in June, she spent much of her first six months still in half-light, while Mr. Johnson, who announced his intention to retire last January, basked in an extended farewell. Timed to the network's 25th anniversary, the transition was marked with a star-studded television special, bicoastal parties and numerous nostalgic looks back.

But Ms. Lee is finally taking center stage. The new chief, now one of the most powerful women in media, will today, at the annual winter gathering of the Television Critics Association, introduce a beefed-up creative team and original programming that, she said, signals "a new day" for BET.

"We spent a lot of time saying goodbye to Bob, and that was great, but now I am ready to look forward," Ms. Lee, 51, said with a hearty laugh in an interview. "It has been more than enough time in the No. 2 position. I am ready to put my stamp on BET. I am so ready."

That stamp includes the hiring of Denys Cowan, the well-known animation producer and director, to head the channel's first-ever animation division as well as the addition of new shows, including "Meet the Faith," a weekly discussion program taking on hot political and social issues from a spiritual and moral perspective.

The shifts at BET coincide with an even larger transition at its parent company, Viacom, which bought the cable enterprise from Mr. Johnson for $3 billion in 2000. Last week the entertainment conglomerate completed its split into two companies, the CBS Corporation and Viacom Inc. BET now accounts for a larger part of the slimmed-down Viacom, which also owns Paramount Pictures, Famous Music and the stable of channels under MTV Networks including MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. Viacom executives are hoping for even greater success from BET, which has maintained revenue growth of 20 percent a year over the last five years and had a 17 percent increase in viewers last year.

"The name of the game really is how do you make the programming more ambitious and substantial than what has been on in the past," said Tom Freston, Viacom's chief executive.

Reginald Hudlin, the veteran filmmaker and producer whom Ms. Lee recently installed as president of entertainment, a newly created position, brokered the new hires. BET has long faced criticism for its heavy reliance on often violent and misogynistic music videos.

Mr. Hudlin, who prior to joining BET was an executive producer of the UPN comedy "Everybody Hates Chris" and helped craft the Cartoon Network's version of the comic strip "The Boondocks," has been among those who bemoaned the channel's lack of ingenuity in the past.

"I wasn't issued a magic wand when I was given the job, so it's not like the entire network is going to be transformed overnight, nor is that our intention," Mr. Hudlin, 44, said. "But if we succeed at even half of what we set out to do, people will have a whole new concept of BET. I think at the end of the year people will be talking about how many BET shows they are TiVo-ing."

Ms. Lee and her new team may have a limited grace period with their critics. The cable channel has canceled nearly all of its news and public affairs programs in recent years. In July, it cut its nightly newscast in favor of news briefs throughout the day. The moves have left many black public figures increasingly frustrated, even as they continue to work with the company from time to time.

"There has been such a pandering to younger people," said the activist and writer Kevin Powell, 38, who covered the 2004 political conventions for the channel and appeared on many of its news programs. "I'm on the college circuit a hundred times a year, and people always ask me what is wrong with BET. We have to stop participating in the one-dimensional portrayals of ourselves. And BET as the premier television network for black people has to take the lead on that."

But Mr. Powell and others said they were hopeful. "It was an ingenious move to put Brother Hudlin in the top creative spot," said Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches a course on hip-hop culture. "He is both commercially proven and intellectually and culturally relevant. He has the voice and vision to make a serious intervention."

Even with the changes, BET's new team has no intention of abandoning its core 18-to-34, largely male, audience. Music videos will still make up a large portion of the programming schedule.

Mr. Johnson over the years has responded to the company's critics with indignation, dismissing many complaints about the lyrics and images in hip-hop videos as supercilious intellectual posturing. "People that deem themselves to be intellectuals felt it important to criticize BET," he said in an interview. "But you take any artist who appears on BET and take them to the N.A.A.C.P. or Urban League convention and you have everybody in the whole convention up and down cheering."

Ms. Lee, too, bats down criticism, though in more measured tones. "We're not PBS, and we'll never be PBS," she said.

But the channel will aim to reach its base with more breadth and creativity, while also trying to woo new viewers, executives said.

One of the channel's new programs is "Lil' Kim: Countdown to Lockdown," a six-episode reality series about the last two weeks in the life of the raunchy female rapper before she began a one-year prison sentence in September for perjury linked to a shooting between rival hip-hop camps.

Another reality series, "Season of the Tiger," chronicles the achievements and pressures of football players and band members at Grambling State University, a historically black school in Louisiana.

"Meet the Faith" is a savvy effort to provide an alternative to Sunday-morning news talk shows often criticized s for not including enough African-American opinion makers. As part of its rethinking of news coverage, the channel is planning more news-magazine-style programming on current events. It recently had a special on the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams as well as one following the death of the comedian Richard Pryor.

Mr. Hudlin, 44, said that Ms. Lee has yet to say no to him. "So far she has been incredibly enthusiastic and supportive of every crazy idea that has come out of my mouth," he said.

For Ms. Lee, the daughter of an Army tank driver and a hospital ward clerk, who earned degrees at Brown University and Harvard Law School, her new role is the culmination of a steady, and largely low-key, ascent over nearly 20 years with the cable company, which she joined in 1986 as a vice president and general counsel.

While cycling through a series of executive posts, Ms. Lee also became a trusted nuts-and-bolts, go-to person for Mr. Johnson. She selected the site for company's headquarters on a 10-acre stretch of land surrounding a former meat-packing plant in Northwest Washington and oversaw its building.

The night before the company went public in 1991, Mr. Johnson said, Ms. Lee stood at the printer late into the night, personally copying the public offering documents, then took the first flight to New York the next morning for the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

Generally reserved and unassuming, Ms. Lee possesses a rebellious streak. She took Chinese studies while studying political science at Brown, largely because of the Black Power movement's fascination with Communist ideology at the time. "It was the 70's, we were more militant then," she said with a smile, reflecting on the era.

In response to questions about the sexualized content in many of the music videos her channel broadcasts, she recalled her parents' objections to her love of the band Parliament Funkadelic. "I don't like everything that is on now," said Ms. Lee, who has a 16-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter. "But it's all about how young people express themselves.

Ms. Lee's professional style is markedly different from that of Mr. Johnson, who crafted a larger-than-life persona during his tenure. "I was an entrepreneur, a 'let me do it, get out of the way and I'll show you' type of person," said Mr. Johnson, whose last official day with the company is Jan. 23, as was spelled out in his contract with Viacom when he sold the company. "She's more a step-to-the-background leader, more analytical, let's-sit-down-and-debate-the-issue."

At a small dinner Mr. Johnson held for Ms. Lee at a Georgetown restaurant after naming her as his successor, he presented his protégée with an orchestra conductor's baton. Someone had previously given him a judge's gavel. "She is far more adept at integrating everybody's interests and bringing people in to create a little bit of harmony," he said.

Ms. Lee said she keeps the baton on the window ledge in her office. "It has a lot of significance," she said. "The founder visionary left, but now there is a new visionary, and we've got to take it to the next level. We have to really act like this is Day 1."

Correction: January 11, 2006, Wednesday An article in The Arts yesterday about Debra L. Lee, the president and chief executive of Black Entertainment Television, misidentified the site of the company's headquarters. It is in the Northeast section of Washington, D.C., not the Northwest.